Randall C. Stuewe
Analyst · Stephens
I think we're going to let the EBITDA side trickle out over time. I mean, obviously, you know what ours is. We've talked about Rothsay in the press release, at CAD 80 million. We talked about the VION at EUR 200 million. So if you use a EUR 135 million rate, you got EUR 270 million there and USD 75 million up at Canada. We talked about TRS being in the low 20s. So you can kind of add it all up and come up with the number. So the most important thing, as we go to the debt and equity markets and we start to put the long-term capital structure in it, is explaining to both our investors and our debt-holders what the true commodity exposure will be. And as we said, as we took over the company here and -- that dates back to 2003, for me, we looked at this thing and we had about little less than half of it on some type of fixed margin formula basis. It was very hard to achieve proper financing with that. So we made a concerted effort to move more and more to some type of predictable margin business. When we added the Griffin team to our family, we learned the poultry business and we learned a methodology that was very similar to ours, but one focused on value-adding, and at the end of the day, would share with suppliers some of the value-addition and put some of it within our own P&L. And it became a very lucrative way of improving the suppliers' economics, helping them grow and ensuring us a chance to grow faster than the others participants in the market. When you put Rothsay on, at the end of the day, you've got a different model where you forward-look to the next quarter and say, "I think protein prices will be x, I think fat prices will be y. Here's the money that I'm traditionally used to making, and here's what I'm going to pay for my raw material." A little under half of Rothsay's business is on some type of margin formula that's been very predictable. The other half is in the mechanism that I just described. Terra, as we said, other than a small portion being within the food service business, used cooking oil collection, and most of that was on some type of matrix pricing arrangement. The industrial residuals business is a fee-for-service business with no commodity exposure. Now you transition to VION. And VION is comprised, as we've talked in the past, of really 4 significant segments or brands within the business, the Rendac, the Sonac, the Rousselot and the CTH business. And the Rendac business, to speak to it, is a disposal rendering or a waste rendering business, where these are the conversion with typical rendering processes of follow-on stock and inedible materials, where they separate the fat and the protein. But those products, because they're C1 and C2 under European classification, can only go to boilers and cement kilns or be incinerated. And so that's a fee-for-service business with a Btu value on the back end. The Sonac business is a classic rendering business like ours, but it prices the way that the Rothsay business does it, forward-looks at where the products will be sold, backs into a margin that they want to achieve, and that becomes the raw material cost. Rousselot is a food ingredient business, very little, if any commodity exposure. It's a supply-demand business on functional food ingredients. And then the CTH business is really a supply-demand business off of the sausage demand and emerging market economies in the world. So if you say from 2003 to Griffin to the next amalgamation of acquisitions here, we think we've reduced our commodity exposure from what used to be. We always talk 65-35, 70-30, down to sub-80-20 now. And still, a portion or a major portion of the 20% comes from the Darling used cooking oil business, but we believe we've put in place the Diamond Green Diesel hedge, which give us some time to prove it out. But at least, on first blush, it looks like it's working.